New facts show that the so-called Russia conspiracy was in fact a product of savvy Russians and credulous, willing, and very dishonest Democrat operatives.

This Trump-Russia collusion narrative is looking more and more like an incredibly intelligent mix of publicly available facts wrapped around some damning pieces of knowing slanders and fictions, all of which were then given the imprimatur of verisimilitude by attaching a retired British spy, Christopher Steele’s name to the whole misbegotten mess. None of the damning pieces have been proven, though several key bits have been disproven. Edward Jay Epstein recently opined at Powerline that the Steele Dossier, to the extent it seems to contain actual information from Russian sources, seems to contain Russian curated disinformation at best.

I am rapidly concluding that the Dossier may represent more than Russian meddling. Certainly Russia meddled. That’s what it does. But in this case, it seems to have gotten some help on the home front. There are far too many coincidences, far too many things that don’t make sense, and in several cases, dogs that don’t bark, for me to believe that, within America’s borders, those working on the Steele Dossier assembled it in good faith as honest, genuine investigatory work. It might be, but that is not the direction in which the known undisputed facts point at the moment.

In addition to reading this post, I recommend you read two other things. The first is Victor Davis Hanson’s article, Hillary’s “sure” victory explains most everything. The second is my post briefly explaining FISA and the questions that the FBI and DOJ have yet to answer about abusing FISA in the Trump-Russia matter. Both will help make sense of the events of the past two years and the tale I tell below.

In the coming days, I will also publish a detailed timeline listing all the relevant events and explaining why many of the key ones are problematic. It is very long. Before throwing you into that deep end, this post simplifies the timeline narrative and lets you see most of the major the issues without having to hack your way through the . . . I would say weeds, but it really is a triple-canopy jungle.

This post, relying on the facts set out in my soon-to-be-published timeline, gives you an insight into what was going on in the Hillary campaign. You’ll see that the evolving Trump-Russia narrative dovetailed perfectly with the struggle Hillary’s campaign had to overturn voters’ firm conviction that it was impossible for anyone to be more corrupt than Hillary.

So, with that preamble, let me ask you to step back in time and pretend you’re a top political operative in the DNC Now, close your eyes and make spooky noises as you travel back through slime, time and space. When you open your eyes, you see that the calendar on the wall shows that today is April 30, 2016.

April 30 . . . and your gal, Hillary Clinton, is tapped as a shoe-in for the nomination. And looking at the crowded Republican primary field, you know it’s a hop, skip and a jump from nomination to her walk on a red carpet, showered with a glittering combination of male tear drops and fragments of glass from the broken ceiling, as she heads to her coronation . . . uh, inauguration.

It’s a beautiful vision. But in the meantime, something has gone wrong. Very wrong.

Now, don’t misunderstand — not everything has gone wrong. The DNC is an arm of Clinton, Inc., bought and paid for, and it is doing her bidding. The DNC has stacked the primary deck in her favor and Hillary has virtually all the super-delegates in her bag.

The MSM is on her side and is pushing Donald Trump’s nomination on the theory that he will be her weakest opponent, Donald Trump. The MSM’s work seems to have paid off, as it is becoming ever more apparent that Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. All of that is great . . . but there are still a few irritants preventing you from reveling in the moment.

The main irritant is that Hillary is still on the ropes with the public for the email scandal that was first exposed almost a year ago. And worse, that public — including all those darn Deplorables — will get to vote for President in six months.

These likely voters know that Hillary, while Secretary of State, put tens of thousands of America’s secrets at risk by running them through an unsecured private server, the entire purpose of which was to thwart Congressional investigations and watchdog groups, something itself completely illegal. (This particular irritant, incidentally, if proven can be punished with 20 years in prison and a ban on ever again holding public office – which may explain why Comey didn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole when he exonerated Hillary on 5 July.) The Russians and every other American competitor and enemy, from China to Iran to the fat boy in Pyongyang, may have copies of all her emails during her time as Secretary of State, exposing both her and our nation to blackmail.

The FBI and DOJ are giving the appearance of investigating Hillary’s wrongdoings, but giving her exoneration a veneer of an honest investigation takes time. The FBI needs to interview witnesses and give them immunity. They need time to make side deals to destroy evidence. The grand jury needs . . . whoops, forgot: Unlike virtually every other criminal case the DOJ and FBI investigate, they haven’t bothered to impanel a grand jury. Someone needs to write (and edit) an exoneration statement, so it doesn’t get thrown together carelessly at the last minute, after you’ve heard and discarded the evidence. And all of this is a pain in the ass when you keep getting interrupted by having to do all these check-the-box “key” witness interviews.

And all the while all this is going on, no one trusts Hillary. She can’t shake the scandal, despite her trying out a new excuse – usually laughable, as even you admit – on a weekly basis.

Still worse, Hillary is facing a real primary challenge from Bernie the Red, despite the fact that the super-delegates will ensure he can’t possibly win. Still, he’s seriously hurting m’lady’s “inevitability” narrative, especially because young Democrat voters, those with the stars still in their eyes, are almost as bothered as the Deplorables are by Hillary’s email “issues.”

Finally, to pile on the irritants bedeviling inevitability. you learn that Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, John Podesta, fell for a phishing scam and now Wikileaks has all the DNC’s and Podesta’s emails. Who knows what dirty laundry lies at the bottom of that black hole?

So many problems it makes even the most confident head spin. You shake yourself — time to get back to concentrating on pulling this tired old donkey across the finish line. You decide that what you are going to need is an opponent who makes Hillary look like an angel dressed in shining white robes; one that makes her seem an avatar of ethics and purity in comparison.

Harvey Weinstein’s disgusting, abusive behavior sheds light on the fact that, from Clinton to Cosby to Weinstein, it’s never about sex, it’s about power.

The Progressive media is talking about Harvey Weinstein in terms of sex, seemingly acknowledging Weinstein’s own definition of himself as a “sex addict.” As Emma Thompson accurately notes, though, the l’affaire Weinstein is not about sex:

“I don’t think you can describe him as a sex addict, he’s a predator. That’s different. He’s at the top of, as it were the ladder of, a system of harassment and belittlement and bullying and interference. This has been part of our world, women’s world, since time immemorial.

Thompson is the first person (I know of) to say this straight out — it’s not about sex. It’s about power. I find that interesting because Second Wave feminism has forever, and accurately, said that rape is not about sex it’s about power. You’d think the media would be more tuned in to this.

A sex addict is someone who is so obsessed with sex that he or she ceases to function in all other ways. The person’s marriage or other close relationships collapse, the person is unable to earn a living, and the person starts getting some very nasty physical consequences. In other words, sex addiction is like drug or alcohol addiction. Anthony Weiner illustrates this principle well. He could not stop himself, long after his problem destroyed every aspect of his life. That’s an addiction.

Weinstein’s power plays against women did not cause him to suffer from any of the downsides associated with addiction. He could have kept his predatory behavior going indefinitely but for the fact that (a) his movies are no longer making money, (b) his protectors, the Clintons and the Obamas, are gone from power, and possibly (c) he came down too strongly on the side of Jews defending themselves when he announced that he was making a movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

So, no, this is not a sex scandal. As has long been the case with Bill Clinton, this is an abuse of power scandal. That’s why conservatives are not hypocrites for refusing to jumble Trump in with this mix of predatory men. Trump’s supporters know that the Hollywood Access tape did not include Trump boasting about rape or sexual blackmail. Instead, he said two things: (1) he made a push for a woman by flashing his wealth at her and, when she declined, he backed off and (2) he stated accurately that when you’re rich and famous, there are women who willingly let you get away with anything. [Read more…]

Can you smell something a bit Apocalyptic in the air? Things are getting fraught as the Left pushes the social and political system closer to the edge.

Our we at end times? I’ve got a few well-written, fact-laden posts to share with you here, all of which are quite worried that the Left is building up to something apocalyptic:

Victor Davis Hanson, who is no hysteric, looks at the concatenation of a deep state doing anything to preserve its power, an openly post-truth media (that my Progressive friends nevertheless believe absolutely no matter how often its proved wrong), and a Democrat party that’s determined to destroy the duly elected president of the United States . . . and he’s worried.

I was alive and sentient during the 1960s and 1970s, and yet, other than the whole Patty Hearst thing, I have no memory of the truly epic violence Leftists were visiting on America in those decades. My defense is that I was a child and a teen but, really, you’d think that, watching the news every night as I did with the family (always Walter Cronkite) I should have remembered something. Indeed, one of the police stations caught up in the violence was about a mile-and-a-half from my childhood home! And Angela Davis’s role in murdering a Marin County judge also played out very much in my neck of the woods. (You’ll read more about Angela Davis later in this post.)

The post is unusually long, but so compelling that I hung on every word. davidzhines reminds us that the Left has had decades to put in place tight organizations that oversee people without conscience determined to use violence to achieve their “people’s paradise.” Conservatives who talk about taking out weenie pajama boys fail to understand the subterranean terrors at which the Left is so practiced — and davidzhines fears that those subterranean terrors are once again waiting to emerge, only this time they’ll include the jihadist obsession with high mortality figures for every terrorist act.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, which is what the American Left keeps hoping America will become, things are not pretty. It appears that part of Sweden’s rape problem might be that, rather like an American college campus, Sweden defines rape to include “he looked at me funny.” On the other hand, you can’t escape the fact that daily life in Sweden has not improved thanks to a Muslim influx.

In assessing Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Americans continue to look away from this election’s most alarming story: the successful effort by a hostile foreign power to manipulate public opinion before the vote.

U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the Russian government actively interfered in our elections. Russian state propaganda gave little doubt that this was done to support President-elect Trump, who repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin and excused the Russian president’s foreign aggression and domestic repression. Most significantly, U.S. intelligence agencies have affirmed that the Russian government directed the illegal hacking of private email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and prominent individuals. The emails were then released by WikiLeaks, which has benefited financially from a Russian state propaganda arm, used Russian operatives for security and made clear an intent to harm the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Of the top of my head, I was able to come up with several “don’t worry” arguments, but I did want to tap all of you for further arguments. Here’s what I’ve come up with: